Re: basic question - where is docs on sim scripting?

There is a scripting whitepaper in the works; we got a little delayed by resources needed recently for HP Tech Forum.

HP SIM is extensible through tool definitions, commonly called TDEFs, which have an XML syntax. There are 3 major kind of TDEFs, web launch tools, single-system-aware tools (unintuitively, this means that HP SIM distributes the task to one or more system and the task is performed at that(those) system(s) and the task itself doesn't involve others, although HP SIM can aggregate the results and display what happened across the systems; these are also called Command Line Tools), and multi-system-aware tools (also called 'custom commands' these execute on the HP SIM server and take targets as an argument, iterating through each one if multiple targets are selected).

HP SIM 5 has a little bit of a wizard for these custom commands, 'New Custom Command.'

The reference to Linux in the URL above is due to the fact that the Linux version of HP SIM has in addition to 'New Custom Command' as a wizard, the advanced scripting available on a Linux shell let us create a Command Line Tool wizard. We had a resource who knew Linux scripting, and, yes, we could have done something similar with Windows Scripting Host but we didn't have a resource.

There are some goodies in the TDEF capabilities, but keep this in mind: complex operations and logic constructs are going to require an external scripting engine of some sort (bash/Bourne shell, Perl, Windows Scripting Host, etc). The majority of a TDEF is really a definition for HP SIM about how to call something.

In the meantime you can do a little reverse engineering on some scripts published by Scott Shaffer in this forum and you also can use the mxtool command to extract the existing TDEFs that are in HP SIM. Don't forget that the WebJet Admin TDEF is a good example of a web-launch tool.